The best way to describe Sean Cliver’s position in life is to say he is the fortuitous victim of circumstance, a condition also known as “dumb luck.”

Hailing from Wisconsin, which is the next best thing to being from Canada or Poland in the eyes of most U.S. citizens, Sean Cliver narrowly escaped an Associates Degree in Commercial Art from a rinky-dink technical college in Madison, WI, when the Powell-Peralta Corporation, a then prominent skateboard manufacturer based in Santa Barbara, CA, elected him to become their in-house deck artist in 1989. A hiring decision ultimately arrived at through an art contest of all things. Yeah, kinda like those Tippy the Turtle things, you could say.

Thus, the 19-year-old kid abandoned his Midwestern upbringings and happily prepared to hand himself over to the long-imagined Devil’s wiles of the West…only there were absolutely none to be had, at least for the three next years, during which time Sean ardently pursued skateboarding and his occupational dream job. However, in November 1991, he was let go from Powell-Peralta in a mass-layoff, albeit conveniently so, due to a rather pronounced and unchecked impudence on his part.

Cliver languished for a week or so in escalating fears of having to return to his homeland in defeat, but lo and behold his salvation came in the form of Steve Rocco, the volatile and impishly wicked owner of World Industries. Once again, Sean found gainful employ to illustrate graphics, this time for a conglomerate of companies that took great pride in having no creative restrictions whatsoever. Perhaps more importantly, though, Rocco soon got the wild hair up his ass in 1992 to create an all-new skateboard magazine. Mostly out of boredom, Sean joined the amateur staff of Big Brother as Senior Writer without a single prior writing credit to his name.

In 1997, Larry Flynt Publications acquired Big Brother from World Industries, upon which time Cliver was immediately promoted to Executive Editor on the grounds that he was the only semi-reliable full-time staff writer still on board (bear in mind, the only grammatical rule he had a relatively clear handle on at this time was the old standby, “I before E except after C,” a qualification met by most any preschooler who watches Sesame Street or Schoolhouse Rock). During his stint at the magazine, which culminated in January 2000, he participated in the creation and direction of the Big Brother skateboard video series, most notably shit, number two, and boob, and maintained a night job churning out further deck graphics for Birdhouse and Hook-Ups Skateboards.

Thanks largely, if not solely, to Sean’s association with Jeff Tremaine, whom he literally lived and worked alongside for eight years on Big Brother’s stumbling rise to infamy, he eventually found himself entrusted with a handful of lofty Hollywood titles on the ensuing jackass and Wildboyz productions, not to mention the corresponding prestige of living up to the adage, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” Regardless, Sean was able to parlay his writing and photography into a book deal with MTV Books in 2002 (the resulting work, Jackass the Movie: The Official Movie Companion Book, can now be had on Amazon.com for as low as $3.24 in brand new condition).

Deluded into thinking he now had a firm foot in the publishing industry as an “established” author, Cliver went ahead and assembled another book, Disposable: A History of Skateboard Art, showcasing over 1000 skateboard graphics with assorted recollections and stories from notable artists and pro skateboarders throughout the last three decades. The proposal for this book went largely ignored by all contacted publishers, whereupon he resorted to a purely low-budget, grassroots effort within the skateboard industry just to get the damn thing produced in November 2004. Disposable has since graduated to a more formal publisher, Gingko Press, and is now in its sixth printing with over 21,000 copies on the market. Currently, Cliver is writing in the third person, an act that feels exceptionally gay.